No group is more determined to stop marriage equality than the Catholic Church. Forget all the other troubles of the world. War, genocide and climate change all take a back seat to marriage equality. The Pope even made his Christmas message about stopping it.

What is interesting is that marriage equality is not a threat to either the Catholic Church or the institution of marriage. What may seem like an obsession might be more of a strategy. Could it be that they are embracing this issue in order to deflect people around the world from their own moral bankruptcy?

On Monday, the President of the United States gave a historical Inauguration speech in which he not only created a progressive vision for America but embraced as a civil rights movement the epic struggle of LGBT Americans for freedom including marriage equality.

At the very same time in Los Angeles, documents were being released that show that in the 1980's there was a massive cover-up by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of sex abuse in the Los Angeles Archdiocese. The Cardinal was a leading advocate for the passage Proposition 8 in California.

Marriage equality is not the Catholic Church's problem. The systematic cover-up of child molesters, reassigning them to other parishes and enabling their abuse to continue is the problem. The Pope should be focusing on his own back yard and not attempting to stop freedom and justice for others.

While the President was speaking and getting it right, the Los Angeles Times revealed that one more Cardinal of the Catholic Church attempted to cover up the sexual abuse and as a result allowed the abuse to continue for years. The Times reports:

"Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement, including keeping them out of California to avoid prosecution, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.

The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders' own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators."